AAAI-86: Fifth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence

The Fifth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

The Fifth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-86) was held August 11–15, 1986, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This year we have split the conference into science and engineering tracks, embodying the recognition that Al is moving out of the laboratory and into the world. The science track stresses the computational principles underlying cognition and perception in man and machine. The papers in this track make significant and original contributions to knowledge in the field of Al. The engineering track highlights the pragmatic issues that arise in applying these computational principles. Engineering track papers make significant and original contributions to reducing A! knowledge to practice. These papers emphasize the synthesis of Al approaches into systems, the demonstration of the practicality of theoretical work, or the performance of Al ideas in practice. These are two tracks of the same conference (rather than two separate conferences) precisely because the division between science and engineering in Al is not distinct. AI has always recognized that implementation accompanies theory.

We have also split the science and engineering tracks temporally. Science papers are presented on Monday and Tuesday; engineering on Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is reserved for material of common interest: keynote speech, presidential panel, award winning papers, and panels and invited talks focusing outward on the interaction of Al and the world at large. We have also scheduled, throughout the week, less technical invited talks and panels that survey the state of the art in particular subfields. We intend these talks to be accessible to attendees who are not specialists in those subfields.

This year, 817 papers were submitted to the conference, approximately twice as many as were submitted to the 1984 conference. We accepted 187 papers. Each was reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. We looked for well-written papers that made original contributions of significant impact. We explicitly rejected papers that were simply implementations of current technology.

The 1986 Publisher's Prize

The AAAI Publisher's Prize, established in 1982, recognizes papers that, in addition to reporting important, substantial research and engineering developments, present the work in an exemplary way. This year, 187 papers on important work were selected by the Program Committee during the normal conference review process. Soon after the Program Committee meeting, several members of the committee, excluding the Program and Associate Chairs, were asked to read the entire set of nominated papers from both the Engineering and Science Programs. Several Committee members selected a subset of papers that s/he felt to be written in an outstanding fashion in both programs. The votes were tallied by several independent parties, and one winner per program very clearly stood out among the rest of the accepted papers.

This year, the Program Committee is pleased to award the Publisher's Prize for the outstanding papers to the following authors:

Steve Hanks and Drew McDermott, Yale University, for "Default Reasoning, Nonmonotonic Logics and the Frame Problem" under the Science Program.